Also thanks to episode #240 of The Changelog, I’m now using a feed reader again – Feedbin. Currently I’m using it to follow all my podcasts so I can read all the show notes. (Downcast’s OPML export feature makes this really easy.) I’m still not sure whether I’ll get back into feed reading like the glory days (AmphetaDesk, Bloglines, Google Reader), but for now this is really handy.

Feedbin home page with all my podcast feeds (click for larger image)Feedbin has a nice feature showing the publishing timeline for each podcast (click for larger image)

Tonight I spent a couple hours troubleshooting a problem with my Tweetfave service and handling of links. Luckily I discovered it was a simple matter of keeping up with Twitter’s API changes. This service has been running so smoothly and the API has actually been pretty stable. I needed to dust off my PHP skills and dig in to track down and adapt to an important change.

Background

Tweetfave is a free service which monitors the tweets you mark as favorites (now referred to as “likes”), then sends them to you by email. Currently the system stats show over 250 users have tried the service, recording just under 400,000 tweets!

One of the handy features in Tweetfave is the “un-shortening” of the short URLs embedded in the tweet. Rather than showing a generic “http://t.co/xyz” link, the software will reveal the original URL.

Problem

This has all been working fine, but recently I noticed something strange where the URL decoding resulted in a link back to the original tweet. Instead we should be seeing the the links within the tweet.

Here’s an example with the original tweet which doesn’t have any links, but does include an embedded image which should have a Twitter image URL:

Example tweet with image

However when it’s processed by Tweetfave, the resulting email snippet shows a link back to https://twitter.com/i/web/status/831963043508596736 which is the original tweet:

Incorrect Tweetfave email snippet

Solution

It took a bit of trial and error, debug logging, and Google searching to find the culprit: the support for more than 140 characters in tweets. When Twitter added that support, they wanted to retain compatibility. Any API call which returned tweet text was still limited to 140 characters, with the link back to the tweet to read the rest.

Here’s a collection of useful command-line notification tools for Mac developers. I’ve been using these for long-running build jobs or other tasks which I’m waiting for. The three methods I describe here are voice audio, system notifications, and SMS text messaging.

Voice Audio

Voice audio is built into Mac OSX and available from the command line with the say utility. To learn the various options, refer to the say man page (or locally just man say).

In the simplest case, just give it a text string to read aloud:

$ say "hello"

Run this at the end of a build step (or anything else which may take a while):

SMS Text Messaging

Finally, we have text messaging. The above two options are useful when you’re at your computer, but if you want to be notified regardless of where you are, text messaging is perfect.

There are a few different options for text messaging from the command line (Google Search for ‘command line text message’ to see a few), but I prefer to use Twilio. It’s much cleaner than some solutions (especially the ones which rely on mobile carriers’ email-to-SMS gateways) and it’s quite cheap ($1/month for a phone number and $0.0075/message).

To set it up, visit the Twilio Labs Bash SMS example page to download the script, configure with your account details, and see the usage patterns.

A simple example will look like this:

$ echo "Watson come here" | twilio-sms 415-555-1212

Then like the other options above you can combine it with your build commands like:

It’s that time of the year again and I’m happy to see Advent calendars for many tech communities are still going strong. As in past years (2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, and for some reason skipped 2015), I’ve gathered a few here that I’ll be following this year:

Here’s what I’m currently listening to when I can. They’ve been piling up a little bit now that my commute is so short, but last week I had a round-trip drive from San Jose to Fresno so really got caught up :) See last year’s updates atBest Technical Podcasts.

Hosted by Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell, this is probably the podcast I’ve listened to the longest. As their site says, the shows “range from introductory information to hardcore geekiness.” In particular I really like their “geek out” episodes, most recently: Supersonic Aircraft Geek Out